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Title: conniption - podictionary 914

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The very first person on record as having had a conniption fit was someone known to us as Aunt Keziah.

The reason Aunt Keziah had a conniption fit was that back in the early 1800s the entire population of the town of Downingville in New England had prepared for a visit by President Andrew Jackson.

Aunt Keziah had made special preparations for President Jackson’s rest and had added feather beads to the straw mattress in the bedroom that was to be his. And just to fancy things up a bit had used the fabric from her red silk dress to make a bedspread.

Everyone had gathered along the improvised ceremonial route and were waiting to greet the President with a two gun salute when Uncle Joshua rode up instead on his old gray horse to say that the President would not be coming.

It was at this juncture that Aunt Keziah had her conniption fit.

To be accurate it was ant Keziah and the account in which this narrative appears goes on to say that it took an hour to bring her tu.

The reason that we have an aunt spelled ant who comes to spelled tu is the same reason that this particular document is the first to set the word conniption to paper.  This is the work of a man named Seba Smith who was the humorist credited with being the first to bring New England backwoods dialect to the written page.

Most of the dictionaries can’t tell us where conniption might have come from. Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable suggests that it might have come from convulsion.  Etymonline says that it is perhaps related to corruption or a rare English word canapshus.

Tony Thorne, in his Dictionary of Contemporary Slang says that the word is more common in Australia and in America than in Britain; plus that it is more common among people who are middle aged.  I can confirm this with a sample size of two since when I asked my own kids what the word meant they were only vaguely aware.

But none of that is very interesting.

What is interesting is that this writer Seba Smith pioneered this form of writing through a character he named Jack Downing and became an influential enough writer that according to Wikipedia, President John Quincy Adams was told by Davy Crockett, that he expected to pass the winter in the company of this fictional Jack Downing because Downing was the only person who seemed to know what the Government was doing.

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